De Engelse schrijver Graham Greene werd geboren op 2 oktober 1904 Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Zie ook mijn blog van 2 oktober 2006 en ook mijn blog van 2 oktober 2007.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Uit: The End of the Affair

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihhilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don't recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like "the dark night" or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman's clothes, scents, pots of cream ... And yet there was this peace ...

That is how I think of those first months of war - was it a phoney peace as well as a phoney war? It seems now to have stretched arms of comfort and reassurance all over those months of dubiety and waiting, but the peace must, I suppose, even at that time have been punctuated by misunderstanding and suspicion. Just as I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men - the favourite lover for the moment. This woman, whom I loved so obsessively that if I woke in the night I immediately found the thought of her in my brain and abandoned sleep, seemed to give up all her time to me. And yet I could feel not trust: in the act of love I could be arrogant, but alone I had only to look in the mirror to see doubt, in the shape of a lined face and a lame leg - why me? There were always occasions when we couldn't meet - appointments with a dentist or a hairdresser, occasions when Henry entertained, when they were alone together. It was no good telling myself that in her own home she would have no opportunity to betray me (with the egotism of a lover I was already using that word with its suggestion of a non-existent duty) while Henry worked on the widows' pensions or - for he was soon shifted from that job - on the distribution of gas-masks and the design of approved cardboard cases, for didn't I know it was possible to make love in the most dangerous circumstances, if the desire were there? Distrust grows with a lover's success. Why, the very next time we saw each other it happened in jut the way that I should have called impossible.

I woke with the sadness of her last cautious advice still resting on my mind, and within three minutes of waking her voice on the telephone dispelled it. I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

"Hello," she said, "are you asleep?"

"No. When can I see you? This morning?"

"Henry's got a cold. He's staying at home."

"If only you could come here ..."

"I've got to stay in to answer the telephone."

"Just because he's got a cold?"

Last night I had felt friendship and sympathy for Henry, but already he had become an enemy, to be mocked and resented and covertly run down.

"He's lost his voice completely."

I felt a malicious delight at the absurdity of his sickness: a civil servant without a voice whispering hoarsely and ineffectively about widows' pensions. I said, "Isn't there any way to see you?"

"But of course."

There was silence for a moment on the line and I thought we had been cut off. I said, "Hello. Hello." But she had been thinking, that was all, carefully, collectedly, quickly, so that she could give me straightaway the correct answer. "I'm giving Henry a tray in bed at one. We could have sandwiches ourselves in the living room. I'll tell him you want to talk over the film - or that story of yours", and immediatley she rang off the sense of trust was disconnected and I thought, how many times before has she planned in just this way? When I went to her home and rang the bell, I felt like an enemy - or a detective, watching her words as Parkis and his son were to watch her movements a few years later. And then the door opened and trust came back.”

Graham Greene

De Amerikaanse dichter en essayist Wallace Stevens werd geboren op 2 oktober 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Na zijn studie rechten in Harvard, die hij hij niet af maakte, werkte hij een tijd lang als journalist in New York. Daar maakte hij in 1903 de studie alsnog af en publiceerde hij ook zijn eerste gedichten. Hij trad vervolgens in dienst bij een verzekeringsmaatschappij in Missouri en leidde later hun kantoor in New York. Door een fusie verloor hij deze baan en vond een nieuwe in Hartford. In 1923 verscheen zijn eerste dichtbundel Harmonium. Deze werd echter nauwelijks opgemerkt, wellicht ook omdat het publiek na het verschijnen van The Waste Land een jaar eerder minder gevoelig was voor verniewingen. Teleurgesteld hierover publiceerde Stevens in de jaren twintig niets meer. Zijn werk vond pas echt erkenning in de jaren veertig. Toen ontving hij ook verschillende prijzen, waaronder de National Book Award.

Poem Written at Morning

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Wallace Stevens

De Duitse dichter en schrijver Andreas Gryphius (gelatiniseerde naam van Andreas Greif) werd geboren op 2 oktober 1616 in Glogau (Silezië). Zie ook mijn blog van 2 oktober 2006 en ook mijn blog van 2 oktober 2007.

Thränen des Vaterlandes

XXIV.

Anno 1636.

WIr sind doch nunmehr gantz / ja mehr denn gantz verheeret!

Der frechen Völcker Schaar / die rasende Posaun

Das vom Blutt fette Schwerdt / die donnernde Carthaun /

Hat aller Schweiß / und Fleiß / und Vorrath auffgezehret.

Die Türme stehn in Glutt / die Kirch ist umgekehret.

Das Rathauß ligt im Grauß / die Starcken sind zerhaun /

Die Jungfern sind geschänd’t / und wo wir hin nur schaun

Ist Feuer / Pest / und Tod / der Hertz und Geist durchfähret.

Hir durch die Schantz und Stadt / rinnt allzeit frisches Blutt.

Dreymal sind schon sechs Jahr / als unser Ströme Flutt /

Von Leichen fast verstopfft / sich langsam fort gedrungen

Doch schweig ich noch von dem / was ärger als der Tod /

Was grimmer denn die Pest / und Glutt und Hungersnoth

Das auch der Seelen Schatz / so vilen abgezwungen.

Andreas Gryphius (2 oktober 1616 - 16 juli 1664)

De Zweedse dichter en vertaler Göran Sonnevi werd geboren in Lund op 2 oktober 1939. Zie ook mijn blog van 2 oktober 2007.

Uit: Mozart's Third Brain (Vertaald door Rika Lesser)

CVI

Which is the time of music?  I know I exist inside it, liberated
As if this were the core:  the dance, the throat, the instruments

Listening, I play   Unknown music grows out of the instrument
Time grows out of me   All the more clearly, out toward the outermost tips of the galaxies
I am a comet, I imagined when I was little, dashing
around the schoolyard, arms outspread behind me like wings. . .

Stalin, too, loved Mozart   Thus even these forms are
completely empty   Interpretations know no limits
Nor shall we have any guarantees   Art is
not an insurance company, not a question of trust, and thus not politics
Disorder is complete   In Dante I find the word modern

The deep architecture of heaven, in its turnings   In music
I hear its deep mysteriousness   I hear its openness
The birds, in their movements over the planet's surface   I see the cranes,
on the banks of Ljusnan, on the field of brown earth, between
flat patches of snow   The water dark, streaming   Heaven's abyss
moves   The fragile, stinging stars rise   How do we
touch one another's souls   In severity's order   In what can only be grace

The skinny woman of about 50, in the May Day demonstration,
who said, never again would she vote for the Social Democrats
All over her face and body she bore the mark of someone betrayed
Who speaks now for the lowest?  And in which language?

Karl is dying now   M was there yesterday, to help out with
the shelves for the LPs   Karl lay in bed the whole time, did not want
to or could hardly speak, but was there mentally   Maybe it's
the morphine, I said, that's making it hard to focus, intellectually
I got the impression, said M, that Karl has now decided
it is time   I recall the severity in Karl's face, the enormous
seriousness, the first time I was up at the offices of Aftonbladet,
in 1967, with the poem, "To the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam";
he read it in my presence   His probing examination, his concentration
How I wondered if it would hold up   In the end almost
nothing does   Except for what exists in the time that is of eternity  

The music deeper and deeper toward darkness   The prelude to Siegfried,
the tubas, the basses   Again in Mahler, Scelsi   How this touches
Europe, invoked also in Dante, in The Paradiso   The third
age will come, according to Joachim de Fiore   But this, too,
will suffer decadence, before perfection in the Last Judgment   Here
all the ages move more rapidly, everything blended, confused   Realms
succeed one another   Within each human being his time   The vector cloud of times
moves, in the stream of people   Under the mountain of the heart hubris grows

Göran Sonnevi (Lund, 2 oktober 1939)

De Oostenrijkse schrijfster en literatuurwetenschapster Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch werd geboren in Linz op 2 oktober 1948. Anna Mitgutsch bezocht tot 1967 het gymnasium in Linz, waarna ze aan de universiteit van Salzburg anglistiek en germanistiek ging studeren. Na verschillende reizen doceerde ze van 1971 tot 1973 aan de universiteiten van Norwich en Kingston-upon-Hull. Ze behaalde haar doctoraat in Salzburg in 1974, met een studie over Ted Hughes, en vervolgens assisteerde ze vier jaar aan het instituut voor amerikanistiek aan de universiteit van Innsbruck.

In 1978 trok ze naar Seoel, alwaar ze als assistent-professor voor Duits en Engels werkzaam was. Tussen 1980 en 1985 doceerde ze aan verscheidene universiteiten aan de Oostkust van de Verenigde Staten. Sedert 1985 is ze zelfstandig schrijfster, en woont ze afwisselend in Linz en in Boston. Tot 2000 was ze lid van de Oostenrijkse afdeling van de International PEN; ze zetelt daarnaast in de Grazer Autorenversammlung en de Interessengemeinschaft Österreichischer Autorinnen und Autoren.

Anna Mitgutsch won verschillende prijzen, waaronder de Gebroeders-Grimm-Prijs van de stad Hanau (1985), de Kulturpreis des Landes Oberösterreich (1986), de Anton-Wildgans-Preis (1992), de Österreichischer Würdigungspreis für Literatur (2001), de Solothurner Literaturpreis (2001), alsmede de Kunstwürdigungspreis der Stadt Linz (2002).

Uit: Die Züchtigung

“Im Kindergarten mußte ich besser gekleidet sein als die anderen Kinder und durfte mich auch nur mit den Kindern aus den sogenannten „besseren Kreisen“ anfreunden. Auch in der Schule gab es erneut Anstrengungen um mit dem Wohlstand mithalten zu können. Beste Schreibwaren, Stifte und adrette Schulkleider. Ich wurde zur Meisterschülerin. Wenn ich Einser nach Hause brachte, war ich Mamas gutes Kind und wurde vorgezeigt. Im Grunde war es Mamas Leistung und beim ersten Zweier begann ich hemmungslos zu weinen, bei der Frau Lehrerin. Wie weit haben meine Schreie wohl gehallt, an schönen Sommertagen, wenn alle Fenster weit geöffnet waren, nur unsere fest und sorgfältig verschlossen.

Mein Vater war nur eine Marionette, die bei uns wohnte, mit uns aß, im Nebenzimmer schlief und den ich „Papa“ nannte. Wenn ihm die Drohungen und Streitigkeiten mit der Mutter zuviel wurden, stand er auf und ging. Die einzige Zärtlichkeit, die ich von meinen Eltern gesehen habe, war vor Zeugen, um ihr Eheglück zu demonstrieren. Sonst gingen sie getrennte Wege: Mutter lehrte mich, meinen Vater zu verachten. Nach der Volksschule ging ich ins Gymnasium, wo ich das einzige Arbeiterkind war und mir dies auch deutlich von meinen Mitschülerinnen gezeigt wurde. Die Schulleistungen sanken in den nächsten Jahren von „Sehr Gut“ auf „Nicht Genügend“. Meine Mutter begann darauf hin wieder – pflichtbewußt wie sie war – mich für jede schlechte Note zu züchtigen.

Ich wurde feige und ängstlich. Die Leute lobten mich, aber sie übersahen das freudlose, verängstigte Gesicht. Bei uns zu Hause herrschte die absolute Sauberkeit und die Vorstellung von schmutziger Wäsche verfolgte mich auch noch in meinen Träumen. überall lauerte die Gefahr, jedes geglückte Abenteuer endete mit Schlägen. Das Schmerzgefühl blieb mir im Hals stecken, wenn sie mich packte und wahllos in mein Gesicht schlug bis ihre Hände und mein Gesicht blutig waren. Ich wurde übergewichtig und so zum Gespött der Klasse und während die anderen Mädchen modebewußt wurden blieb ich matronenhaft.

Mein Mutter war glücklich, die Pubertätskrise war überwunden und ich wurde wieder Klassenbeste! „Vera ißt brav, Vera lernt brav, Vera macht mir jetzt viel Freude“, sagte sie zu ihren Schwestern. Mutter hatte nun auch diese Runde gewonnen.

Die Matura bestand ich mit Auszeichnung und meine Eltern kamen in die Schule, als ich für ausgezeichnete Leistung einen Kunstband vom Direktor bekam.

War meine Erziehung damit abgeschlossen?”

Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch (Linz, 2 oktober 1948)

De Britse (reis)schrijfster en historica Jan Morris werd als James Humphrey Morris geboren op 2 oktober 1926 in Clevedon, Somerset. Zij volgde een opleiding aan het Lancing College, West Sussex, Morris is vooral bekend vanwege haar Pax Britannica trilogie over de geschiedenis van het Britse Rijk, en voor haar geschreven portretten van steden als Oxford, Triest, New York en Venetië. Ook schreef zij over de Spaanse cultuur en geschiedenis. Jan was als man geboren en trouwde met Elisabeth Tuckniss. Het paar kreeg vijf kinderen. In 1972 veranderde Morris van sexe via een operatie en nam de naam Jan aan, maar bleef getrouwd. De zoektocht naar haar identiteit beschreef zij in haar boek Conundrum.

Uit: Jan Morris drinks her way across Europe

„Everyone seems to know everyone else in the Plaza de la Paz. Everyone knows the two ancient ladies who walk up and down, up and down, past the cafe tables beneath a shared white parasol. Everyone greets the extremely genteel seller of lottery tickets, and time and again the cry of Hombre! rings across the square as stocky jarreños (jug-makers, as they call Haro citizens) greet one another around the bandstand. Every passer-by peers into the convivial interior of the Café Madrid, to see what friends are propping up the bar, and a few look curiously at me as I pour more wine from the bottle I have put under the table, to keep it out of the sun.

I must not idealize the scene. A group of suave Spaniards (from Burgos, they tell me) has just settled at a pair of tables on the pavement, very gold-bangled and silk-scarfed and sunglassed, and a terrific pair of thugs whom I take to be Basque terrorists has just swaggered by with an alarming dog. There are a few weirdos about, bikers in leather jackets, babies in ostentatious prams. But in general the passers-by seem people without pose or affectation, a rough but serene kind of people, from a rough but generally serene place.

And the wine? Give me a moment, while I swallow this prawn and think about it. Mmm. More serenity than roughness, I think. It is example No. 1,301 of a remarkable vintage of 8,400 bottles that won important prizes in Bordeaux last year, but it is loyal Rioja all the same, well-oaked, honest, strong, straight, an organic tasting wine. And as is only proper in the new Spain -- in the new Europe -- its winemaker was a woman.“

Jan Morris (Clevedon, 2 oktober 1926)